--On Wednesday, May 29, 2013 18:20 +0300 Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > There seems to be a general pattern where new participants > first participate and/or produce IDs but it takes some time to > produce RFCs. For instance, for a while it was the case that > there was a growing number of proposals and participants from > China, but it is only more recently that the RFC statistics > reflect this (see the bright green line in > http://www.arkko.com/tools/rfcstats/countrydistrhist.html). > The hypothesis is that first of all, it takes a while to > produce RFCs :-) and that new participants take a while before > they get up to speed on the process, find enough other parties > that share similar needs for the specific technical work, etc. I would add to that list the observation that, when complete newcomers come to the IETF in order to propose some pet idea or personal invention and get it standardized, the first I-Ds that they submit often don't go anywhere because they propose a networking model that is outside IETF scope, have serious technical flaws the authors did not identify, just are not of interest to other members of the community, or are generally off the wall for some other reason (such as requiring changes to laws of physics or axiomatic definitions of mathematics). Certainly not every proposal with which a newcomer arrives falls into those categories -- some have been useful -- but it is important to remember that there are substantive reasons why I-Ds submitted within the first months of someone's participation often have a lower acceptance rate as RFCs than ones that come from more experienced participants. I think there are important questions as to whether we handle such proposals in a way that maximizes the odds of future participation by those individuals and suspect we could do better in that area. But those are separate issues. john